


Saint Robbie The First

by VinHampton



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:00:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinHampton/pseuds/VinHampton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vin recalls her life in East London as a teenage runaway, and losing her virginity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saint Robbie The First

Robbie was my first. 

First... what? Did I love him? I loved him with wide eyes, if you could call it love. Perhaps it was more admiration, more adulation, awe. He was twenty-two, a skinny thing, but tall. His eyes were the colour of chocolate, his skin milky, and he always smelt faintly of wine gums. I was on the cusp of seventeen - sporting a mask of thick black eyeliner, a nose-ring, a permanently bemused expression. Dressing up was slipping into a black velvet party dress I bought in Oxfam. 

Life was an endless idyll, days melting into nights, weeks melting into months. Occasionally, the pub around the corner would be filled with people eating roast lunches, the smell of onions and meat permeating the air, and we would deduce it was the weekend or a bank holiday. 

I shared a one-bedroomed flat with three other people. Or they shared it with me, taking me in after they found me living under the bridge at Camden Lock, my hair knotted and my eyes wet with tears and tiredness. 

Marta and Smut were a couple. I don't think I ever learnt his real name, and I dared never ask why they called him Smut, but the pair of them were joined at the hip. Marta was a true beauty. Her mother was Italian, her grandfather Palestinian. She looked like she belonged everywhere and no-where. Her eyes were a dark, dark green malachite, with heavy lids like perfect half-shells and thick, black eyelashes. Her skin was golden, like she had been dipped in olive oil and left to set in the balmy Mediterranean sun. She had full lips and full hips and a soft, round belly, and she swathed herself in kaftans and sarongs and saris in earthy colours, all bought from the market. She made jewellery, and strings upon strings of beads of glass and resin and wood hung from her neck and from her wrists. 

Beads and scarves jewels and odd bits of pliant wire littered the apartment, catching the last rays of light through the dusty, fusty windows at sunset, and turning our abode for the shortest time each day from a sty into a kaleidoscope. 

Marta gesticulated as she spoke, and caressed the back of Smut's neck when she was thinking. Smoke hung around her like a haunted spectre, wisps of it mingling with her dark brown hair, mixing with the apple scent of her conditioner. 

"Fucking..." she would say, starting off her sentences with a curse, using the word as a placeholder for her thoughts. "Fucking landlord's riding us again. He should fix the leaks and the plumbing," she'd take a long drag of her cigarette and we'd hang on to her words as she let the smoke blacken her lungs; "And then we'd bloody well pay on time!" 

Smut, Adam's apple bobbing, would nod in agreement, enraptured by her. He was nineteen, a year younger than her, and he was small in stature. She upstaged him completely but he followed her gladly, like a herald, with a shock of red hair and an attempt at a beard. He smoked nothing but marijuana and his eyes were always bloodshot, but he was kind and, sometimes, even funny. 

They had met Robbie at a Radiohead concert. They'd been looking for a flatmate, and they had known the girl Robbie was seeing at University. Robbie was doing his finals then, and because he could only afford to work part time, the low rent suited him well. Yes, he'd be sleeping on a mattress in the living room of a shithole in Shoreditch (which, at the time, was not the trendy bran muffin and quinoa haven it is today) but at least he'd have a roof over his head and a constant supply of drugs.

And so they lived until I came along and widened the circle. Marta worked in a sandwich shop on Old Street. On most days, she scraped together enough leftovers to bring home dinner - a feast of bread and chicken and tuna and lettuce and tomatoes. Smut had quit his job as a Chinese food delivery boy, using his run-down Vespa to deliver marijuana and cocaine and ecstasy tablets to clients - a much more profitable endeavour. Robbie graduated with a first class honours in philosophy, and after a six-month stint of unemployment, convinced Smut he would be great for business. And so he was. They worked in tandem – Robbie finding clients and doing the accounts, Smut delivering the goods. 

The two men were wary of me when Marta dragged me into the house, stripped me down and bundled me into the shower. 

I heard the hushed voices through the walls. “She could be anyone”; “Can’t start taking in strays”; “She’ll steal from us”. I heard Marta defend me: “Fucking… she’s so young and completely lost. She’ll die or get killed if we leave her. I take full responsibility…”

I scrubbed the grime off my body, scraped it from under my fingernails. I had not had a real shower in six days, had not slept in a real bed in a week. It had been ten days since I ran away. I was starving, and wolfed down a day-old sandwich Marta had offered me. I’d never known hunger before, but it would come to be a familiar sensation.

Marta put an arm around my shoulders and herded me to the sofa, handing me a too-big Ramones t-shirt and a pair of shorts, a cushion for my head and a tatty blanket.

“You will stay here,” she said. “And you just leave the boys to me. We’ll get you sorted out.” Her bangles jangled, and I could hear her thighs softly rub together under her skirt as she left the room. Robbie, from his mattress, eyed me suspiciously. I made myself as small as possible until exhaustion took over. By the end of the week, he’d lent me his copy of Les Mots et Les Choses, and I read bits of it out loud during the day, sitting cross-legged on the sofa while they were out of the house. Soon, Robbie and I were sitting up all night, talking. I was in awe of him. He had been to university and he was a good teacher. He was passionate about the Sophists, and so I became passionate about them also. He loved Deleuze more than anything, and quoted him to me, enunciating each word like a man of faith spreading the Good Word.  
The weeks tumbled on. I read all day, devouring Robbie’s books, educating myself. One night, Smut brought a laptop home, grey and heavy. The next evening, we had a dial-up connection. I taught myself basic codes – they were an easy enough transition from the logic gates Robbie had me practising. 

Marta was my confidante, but Robbie became my partner-in-crime. Except everything he did, he did with the burden of responsibility, like I ought to be protected. When I suggested I could earn my keep by helping him and Smut with their clandestine business, he grew angry and said I was to stay out of trouble. 

On special days, he let me take his mattress. My back sang in relief on those nights. 

The first time I took cocaine, he was furious. I think he was angrier at himself for not having hidden the stash better. I lined up the white powder as I had seen Marta and Smut do so many times, and I inhaled it through a rolled-up receipt. He came home and I was all over the place, talking at a hundred miles an hour. He wouldn’t speak to me, and slept facing the wall that night. 

And then, one special night, on the cusp of seventeen, he let me take his mattress and he let me take him, and each kiss he delivered was apologetic and rhetorical, and every gentle caress was a premise, to which I supplied a conclusion. 

[If/When] [And/Then]  
[And; And; And; And]  
[Or?] [And]

Losing my virginity was a rite of passage. I came, then I came of age. It hurt, and then it didn’t. And for days afterward, I was more aware than I had ever been of the chasm between my legs and everything it stood for. 

I realised then he had fallen in love with me. 

And I do not know why I denied him my love. I could have been happy with him, but he’d opened me up, and he’d opened up another world. It was not that I wanted to be promiscuous, but he had fulfilled his role as educator. I slept with him another time afterwards, but it was different, and shrouded in a resigned sort of sadness which did not disappear for days. 

He was my first.


End file.
